African Peanut Stew

Chris and I are going to North Africa in a few weeks. We're headed to the beautiful kingdom of Morocco and there will be cooking lessons, mountain treks, spice market strolls, and more! I cannot wait. Especially for all of the lovely food!

To get us in the mood (and also because my grocery delivery hadn't yet arrived and we were out of almost everything), I decided to make a lovely stew based on an "African Peanut Stew" recipe from Emeril that I found here. I had most of the ingredients: chicken broth, coconut milk, sweet potatoes, onions, etc., so I figured it made sense to go this route. Otherwise, we'd be eating Cheerios for dinner, which is not very Moroccan.

I tweaked Emeril's recipe a bit (okay, I tweaked it a lot), using almond butter instead of peanut butter and adding the brown sugar, garlic powder, carrots and peanuts. And, since I didn't have any tomatoes, I used some tomato paste and a jar of restaurant-style salsa, which added the tomato element and some extra spice. I also used my immersion blender to pulverize the peanuts, onions and salsa, leaving behind a few chunks of sweet potato and carrots for texture. I stirred in a cup of shredded chicken breast near the end instead of the ground turkey, since I didn't have any. On a whim, I decided to use up some of the nearly frozen herbs from my outdoor garden and the addition of the tarragon and thyme really brightened the dish. Cilantro would be nice, too.

Served with some warmed garlic naan that I found in the freezer, it was a pretty lovely weeknight meal that only took about an hour to throw together. Yes, that is much longer than it takes to ready a bowl of cereal, but it was worth every minute. Yum!

Gourmess Archives

My Motto

About Me

I'm a petite but powerful marketing maven who should have gone to culinary school. Or moved to France. When I'm not at my day job in NYC, I spend most of my time in the kitchen coming up with creative cookery ideas. There is usually a mess involved. (Hence the GourMESS title.)

Cookery Experience

For six months in 2010, I taught myself the French Culinary Institute's official textbook, The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine, and prepared (and blogged about) every demonstration in the course.

On Making a Mess of Things

“I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.” ― Julia Child